Our ancestors lived on the edge of the world, and they knew it.
We who live in the European diaspora place ourselves at the center. We're used to thinking of Europe and North America as the center. Maybe even specifically New York and London because these are, or have been, the world's commercial and political centers. Before that Paris was the center, and before that Rome.
For our ancestors a thousand, two thousand years ago, Rome was the center. I often hear how Christians imposed their religion on our people. A very romantic notion, but problematic on many levels. Rome had money, power, advanced technology, and an ancient history that far outstripped backwoods and backwards barbarian kingdoms. Our ancestors couldn't sign up fast enough to join the cool kids. Rome was Christian. Clearly, the Christian god was more powerful and more sophisticated, so get yourself baptized if you want to go further in life.
The proof is in the result. The elites became Christian first; the country folk later. When we look for pagan survivals we look to uneducated country folk, to folklore and remote regions. That in itself tells the story. Conversion would not have happened if the elites hadn't seen an advantage.
Conversion brought our northern and western European ancestors within Rome's orbit, but it didn't put them at the center. They remained at the fringes until they put themselves at the center during the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the Age of Discovery.
We get a sense for this feeling of being at the edge of the world from the early Celtic saints, in the first generations after conversion.
For example, Adomnán says "Although he [St. Columba] lived in this tiny island out at the extremity of the Ocean near Britain, his renown has spread to as far as three-cornered Spain and Gaul, and then beyond the Alps into Italy, and has even reach the head of all the cities: the city of Rome itself." (Vita Columbae, 3:23, quoted by O'Loughlin, 49).
On the edge, but a part of the whole. O'Loughlin observes that Adomnán saw himself as a member of three communities. He belongs to the Irish people, which he can distinguish from the Picts in Scotland and the Anglo-Saxons in England. He belongs to the Christian people, which links him to other Christians in faraway places and distinguishes him from pagans, Jews, and perhaps Muslims. And he belongs to the family of St. Columba, which connects him to all of humankind through a common descent from Noah (O'Loughlin, 52-53).
An abundance of caution here. I might or not need to point out that our newly converted ancestors must have felt a bit lacking in historical depth. I often point out that we should not be surprised when archaic people are descended from their gods. Our ancestors were no different. The native dynasties were descended from their own gods. They weren't descended from Biblical characters until they became Christian, accepted the apparently superior historical detail of the Christian scriptures, and adapted their own genealogies to fit the new information.
O'Loughlin makes the point more elliptically, in a way that emphasizes the idea of harmonization rather than conflict between old and new.
Jesus is said to have commanded his followers to "make disciples of all nations" (Matthew 28:19-20). This meant the newly converted peoples were nations, on par with the more ancient nations of the apparently older, more civilized world.
"This notion of a 'nation' (gens) hearing the Word became an enduring theme in insular writing not only among the Celtic peoples, but was transmitted by them to the Anglo-Saxons and can be seen in Bede. . . . Their own cultural reality was not seen by them as submerged into 'Christendom', rather they now stood among the People of God as a nation. This perception of Christianity as the gospel spreading through nation after nation goes along way towards explaining why we do not have extensive evidence for clashes between the old and new religions. This is so much at odds with what we have seen of the work of missionaries in recent centuries that we find it hard to imagine the arrival of Christianity as anything other than the destruction of local consciousness through the importation of a foreign cult" (O'Loughlin, 55).
But even as the new converts were brought into the world of civilized nations, their experience was different.
"When we contrast the experience of someone like Eucherius in Lyons reading the Scriptures with that of someone in Ireland a few generations later, we see a massive cultural shift. Eucherius lived in a great city, Lyons, in the same empire within which Jesus had lived; he had Greek contacts around him, and even when he read the Scriptures in translation it was in his own language, Latin. A story of Christ going to the city of Jerusalem, its great temple, and being tried by the governor was all firmly within his own world. The Christian in Ireland fifty years later had not seen a city, had to learn a foreign language to read, and had to imagine the event by analogy with his surroundings. While he may have had a store of local religious traditions, customs and laws, and a body of history, this did not come with the dignity of writing to support it, and the process of rendering his own speech in writing was just beginning. In this he anticipated many Christians who would hear the gospel in centuries to come, and like those later people he probably felt that he was the poor man at the feast" (O'Loughlin, 61).
My thought when I read this is that Christianity was alien to world of the north and west Europeans, and in many respects it still is.
- Thomas O'Loughlin, "Living on the Fringes" in Journeys on the Edges: The Celtic Tradition (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2000), 47-63.
